Showing posts with label methods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label methods. Show all posts

Saturday, 6 December 2025

House on the Road to Halepa


 House on the Road to Halepa
(Acrylic on canvas panel, 30x30 cm)

 It’s taken a while to get there, but we have arrived. When I set out to paint this picture, I had a definite idea of how I wanted it to look, an idea that came to me even as I sat in the little park just outside Chania in September this year. 

It might be interesting to post the photographs I took of the house and the tree so you can see how things have changed in the production of the painting.





Friday, 23 September 2011

Empty Headed


Sitting on the little balcony above our apartment in Soller, I looked out over the sun-splashed Mallorcan landscape and sipped a small glass of local brandy.

"Pat," I said, "my head is completely empty."

Far from being a worrisome condition, I realised that this was a very desirable state. In the weeks before flying out to Mallorca, my head was full of stuff: worries about money, things that needed doing in the house, the way my work was heading, ... just stuff. And now here I was recognising the absence of all that stuff. Where it all went, who can say, but it had gone and for the two weeks we spent ambling around in fantastic sunshine, my head remained happily empty.

What this inevitably meant was that I did no work in my sketchbooks, so for now I have nothing to show you; but I've mentioned recently that I felt my ways of working were becoming stale and now I can sense the seeds of new ideas settling into the welcoming emptiness of my brain.

In a little while I suspect my long-awaited shake-up may make itself felt. Could be fun.

Thursday, 20 November 2008

A Small One to Get Me Going


St James's Park (work in progress)

Work on the Barley Mow painting is getting so fiddly that I needed something to get me into a rhythm at the Club today. This little painting - which isn't finished yet - was sufficient to free me up and let me move on to the Barley Mow, which I left like this today:


Barley Mow (work in progress)

I worked on the edge of the quay today and used masking tape to get the edges sharp. Although I'm not desperately keen on very tight edges elsewhere in the composition, I often find that where I have a line running right across the picture the way the quayside does here, I enjoy playing off a very straight edge against the less rigid edges elsewhere.

I've also made a start on that problematic building at the top right, but I'm not happy with it yet.